…And God what belongs to God. In the early Church the foundation of words passed off as the fruit of modernity. A truth that is too easily betrayed

By RAFFAELLO VIGNALI

IThe Czech sociologist Vaclav Belohradsky, during an interview, said, “European tradition means not ever being able to live above and beyond one’s conscience by reducing it to an anonymous apparatus like the law or the state. This ‘fixed point’ of the conscience is a legacy of the Greek, Christian, and bourgeois tradition. The irreducibility of the conscience to institutions is threatened in the era of mass media, totalitarian states, and the generalized computerization of society. Indeed, it is very easy for us to succeed in imagining institutions organized so perfectly as to impose any action of theirs as legitimate. Having an efficient organization is enough to enable one to legitimize anything. Thus, we could sum up the essence of what threatens us as this: states programming their citizens, industries consumers, publishers, readers, etc. All of society, little by little, becomes something that the state produces for itself.” This passage was adopted for CL’s Easter Poster a few years ago.

The irreducibility of the conscience to the state
From the beginning of Christian history, the problem of the relationship with the state has existed. St Paul sent a fugitive slave, whom he had converted, back home, giving him a letter for his master, whose name was Philemon (he too a Christian). In it, St Paul reminded Philemon that by now he could not consider the man a slave any more, but a brother and friend. Never before had a Roman citizen dared to affirm so drastically a criterion diverging from the one belonging to the ancient mentality, ratified also by Roman law, that considered slaves as mere tools.

Thus, in the Letter to Diognetus, responding to the accusations of the pagans that he did not consider idols as gods and thus that he was eluding the common social responsibilities, an anonymous second century author stated that Christians are not bearers of a doctrine that is the “fruit of considerations and lucubrations of curious persons, nor are they promoters, like some people, of any human theory,” but they are amazed witnesses that “the Creator of all did not send to men, as some might imagine, a servant, an angel, an archon, but the very Maker and Author of all…. Like a king sends his son who is a king, He was sent as God, as a man among men, to save by convincing, not in order to overcome, because violence is not fitting for God.” This is why the author could point out that Christians “obey the established laws, but with their lives they go beyond the laws,” introducing an acute observation on the value of the conscience in the conception of the person and of life, well beyond mere observance of external rules.

We could obviously cite other instances, even extremely meaningful ones, concerning this aspect.

But perhaps it is more helpful to recall a fact, an episode, that was practically ignored in the history books, even when the new school curricula had not yet cancelled out, with a deplorable swipe of the eraser, centuries of man’s laborious journey to affirm his meaning. In 390, Theodosius–who, before becoming one of the greatest Christian emperors, had been a great military commander–received the news that some Roman soldiers had been killed in Thessalonica. Immediately, as the code of war established, he ordered retaliation. Games were organized in the circus of the city and, once they began, the gates were closed and the people ferociously slaughtered. When the Bishop of Milan, Ambrose, found this out, he excommunicated the emperor. So Theodosius came to Milan and remained on his knees outside the cathedral until the great bishop had granted him pardon. This was a decisive turning point in history: for the first time in the Western world, a limit was placed on the absolute and total power of the state, and this limit was the value of the person, which the Christian conscience had established. The state gave up its sacred character, accepting that man could give to God what belonged to God, while still continuing to demand that he give to Caesar what belonged to Caesar.

The Western idea of freedom
If history is a process, i.e., a journey, and if certain episodes constitute veritable milestones along the way, this event was one of them. This separation of state and sacred marked the final and inevitable setting of the ancient idea of the state and at the same time the dawning of the Western idea of freedom. From that moment on, two realities were present, which could not claim for themselves the characteristic of totality. The state became “secular,” that is to say, it came to a halt at the limit of the conscience that looks elsewhere for its consistency; the Church, in turn, recognized the state’s authority in its own field, for example in the administration of civilian justice.

Obviously, the balance between these two realities has not always been maintained over the centuries. When the balance has been skewed, there have been periods of harsh conflict between the two realities. Nonetheless, there have always arisen men and movements that have kept the Church and State from melding, as a result of the invasion of one’s space by the other, and giving rise to a totalitarian power. Examples are Cluny and Citeaux in the centuries around the turn of the first millennium, Bartolomeo de Las Casas at the time of the Conquistadores, Maximilian Kolbe (to cite a recent example).

In a very fine book of his, with the meaningful title, The European Adventure, our friend Léo Moulin (who called himself an agnostic) noted, “Like equality, the idea of freedom, democratic ideas, and the ideology and sensibility that are connected with them, are also found in embryo in Christian doctrine, and sometimes more than in embryo. Some may reply that the Church has been and has chosen to be a theocracy over the centuries; that it has always and everywhere exalted the absolute power of the pope, supported kings and the powerful, encouraged reaction…. My whole childhood was beguiled by the anticlerical imprecations and the ‘free thinking’ of a family that presented Jesus to me as the victim of the priests and the powerful. I ate a priest at every meal for twenty years. This is said by the historian, and the sociologist that I try to be, both for good and for ill, and who, more for ill than for good, feels a duty, in all conscience, to blunt, and very often to contradict, these heavy observations. To me, if the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen has been able to resound in Western hearts as an act of faith, it is because it was rooted already for centuries in the historical soil of the West. Because the affirmation and development over the centuries within the religious orders of the democratic principles of the right to elect those who govern them and to inform them on matters concerning them; the recognized primacy, in all constitutions, of the assembly, summa potestas, supreme authority and source of all power; the fine-tuning of electoral and deliberative techniques in extraordinarily minute detail; the remarkably well-balanced organization of hybrid systems of government; the definition of a rule of law which recognizes limits of conscience to the duty to obey; respect for a pluralism that is certain; the definition of a concrete federalism had, beyond a shadow of a doubt, sharpened Western sensibility and thought in the direction of democratic forms of organization. Here, again, the correlation uniting the ‘great strength’ of democratic ideas with Christianity seems to me hard to contest.”

Conversely, once again in the West, twentieth century totalitarian regimes generally set one goal: to manipulate or nullify the conscience of men. A German politician stated that he heard Hitler, very early in his rise to power in Germany, say these words: “I free man from the constriction of a spirit that has become an end in itself; from the dirty and humiliating self-afflictions of a chimera called conscience and morality, and from the demands of a freedom for personal self-determination which very few are capable of handling.” Evidently, his lesson was successful, if one of the last leaders of the Third Reich could echo him, beatifically, “I have no conscience! My conscience is named Adolph Hitler!” On another front, it is sufficient to recall some passages from the book Life and Destiny, by Vasilij Grossman, or the unforgettable pages of Solzhenitsyn’s books.

Ratzinger, the West, and Islam
Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in an essay on this subject, “The modern idea of freedom is therefore a legitimate product of the Christian vital space; it could not have developed in any other milieu than this. Indeed, we should add: it cannot be implanted into any other system, as we can readily observe today in the rebirth of Islam. The attempt to graft the so-called Western criteria, detached from their Christian foundation, onto Islamic societies, disregards the internal logic of Islam as well as the historical logic to which the Western criteria belong. Such an attempt was therefore destined to failure in this form. The social structure of Islam is theocratic, and therefore monistic, not dualistic. The dualism that is the prior condition for freedom in turn presupposes the Christian logic. Practically speaking, this means that only where the dualism of the Church and state is preserved, as a necessity both sacred and political, does the basic condition for freedom exist. Wherever the Church itself becomes the state, freedom is lost. But even where the Church is suppressed as a public necessity and an important public presence, freedom falls away, because the state once again claims for itself the foundation of ethics. In the secular, post-Christian world, the state puts forth this claim not in the form of sacred authority, but as ideological authority.”

In Italy today, the state does not claim to posit itself as an alternative to the Church, at least not in principle. In short, it presents itself as a secular state, which does not intend to impose its own ideology, its own culture. In a word, it does not intend to replace the conscience and freedom of persons. Freedom, which so much of the press negates through nihilistic or instinctive positions, as the conscience’s capacity to engage with reality and as a capacity for construction, saves the state, and the state guarantees freedom–substantially, and not just formally–if it respects the principle of subsidiarity.